Upgrading WordPress 2.1 to 2.8
[This is a manual repost of an article posted previously but lost when I moved my blog]
I have been putting off upgrading this blog from WordPress 2.1 but I wanted to play with the WordPress for iPhone application so had to bite the bullet and upgrade to get XML-RPC support that the iPhone application needed.
My blog hosts at DreamHost [not anymore DreamHost sucks!] and I should have been able to use their nice “one click install” to upgrade my WordPress installation but I had moved directories and messed around with the WordPress install and had broken the ability to automatically upgrade. The DeamHost Web Panel One Click Account Backup made it easy to grab a pre-upgrade snapshot of everything including the MySQL database content. It packages all that as a tarball that I could download and save to a local system.
Anyhow since I used a modified theme and had played with other things I needed to do a full manual upgrade of WordPress so I followed the WordPress “extended” upgrade instructions. Once I logged into the WordPress Admin panel it let me know that it wanted to update the database and that ran fine.
So upgrading WordPress itself was painless however getting WordPress for iPhone running was not. When trying to set up the blog on the iPhone application I got the infamous “We could not find the XML-RPC service for your blog” error message.
Anyhow I looked around at what others have done and tried the following.
I checked in the WordPress Admin Settings>Writing panel and check that XML-RPC was enabled. But apparently this is not always enough and sometimes the box is checked but XML-RPC is disabled. So I disabled XML-RPC and then renenabled it. That did not solve the problem.
I found my solution here. I checked the header.php file in my current themes folder and made sure there was a correct tag–there was. Then following the rest of the instructions I used the WordPress Admin Appearance>Themes panel to set the current theme to something simple. I just chose the WordPress Default 1.5 theme. Then I configured my blog in the WordPress for iPhone application. Hurray! This time it worked. Then I went back to the Admin panel and changed the theme back to my custom theme.
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So I want to play more, and the Admin panel in WordPress 2.8 is much nicer than 2.1
I am disappointed that the WordPress 2.8 still does not support custom words in the spelling dictionary. This is the most painful thing I find with WordPress. Oh and you would guess that the WordPress built in dictionary would know how to spell “WordPress”. Bzzzt WRONG!
